> People don't want to care about what "an instance" is which also means being asked to be aware of things like instance-specific moderation rules.
I can tell you how this reads to me: "I consider myself among peers with coders, scientists, and founders. Being asked to understand pretty simple concepts is too much for me."
I am a happy user of Lemmy. Was there more to understand than how to join Reddit? Yes. Is the fediverse simple enough to understand that people on HN should be viewed with incredulity when they make statements that it's too difficult / too much? Unless they're speaking about people who aren't HN commenters, also yes.
> "I consider myself among peers with coders, scientists, and founders. Being asked to understand pretty simple concepts is too much for me."
I think I can clarify the framing here. People of all walks are extremely uninterested in being told that they need to care about something that they do not care about. For most people, I bet almost all people, decentralization can really just get fucked, because decentralization is not what people are there for. Connection is. What federation offers is just not important to...as a percentage, almost anyone...in relation to what it removes.
Think about it this way: many things are too annoying for you to put up with, even if you technically are capable of dealing with them were you willing to give more energy than you believe is reasonable to give. See also, juice vs squeeze. See also, the iron imperative of writing ("don't waste the reader's time") applies to more than just writing.
Also...
> "I consider myself among peers with coders, scientists, and founders."
One might call it empathy to commiserate with the perspectives of people who are not those things. It's a judgement error to expect a platform to be something other than niche without that. One can also be all of those things and have zero patience for software that has an annoying user experience.
> People of all walks are extremely uninterested in being told that they need to care about something that they do not care about.
You don’t care. There it is. Just say it. It’s not a crime. I’m not judging you. I’m really not.
I care and it might not matter, but I do. It’s not for you. That’s ok. Don’t bag on it for reasons other than this. It’s not difficult and I don’t care if you don’t care. It’s fine.
I'm wondering if the context has been lost because of the length of the chain that this thread is a conversation about why people, especially non-technical and non-philosophically-motivated people, people for whom the concepts of federation and disjoint instances are actually detrimental rather than beneficial because they fundamentally erase some of the most useful features of social network platforms (e.g. global search), don't use Mastodon over something else.
> You don’t care.
Forget about me for a moment. We're talking about people. Most people, in fact. Actually the upstream comments use the term "normies", which is a term that I personally object to because it's pejorative and gross behavior. It's imperative that you evaluate this thread within the given context.
Side note on upstream calling people "normies": It's absolutely nuts to me that the groups most sensitive to othering will themselves engage in mindless othering. But anyway.
> It’s not difficult
To you. In fact one of the things that makes something difficult is how much a person is forced to deal with things that they don't want to deal with, especially when those things are the opposite of what they want from a service.